The
Vinik-inspired sales tax referendum came under heavy fire Thursday night when
Tampa’s African American community attacked it as vague, promoting unwanted
gentrification, and a bailout for development interests at the expense of the
working poor.

After
the meeting, NAACP President Yvette Lewis declared the referendum’s backers
“can’t ram this down our throat. Our community will cast a ‘no’ vote against
this regressive tax.”

For
Vinik: an epic fail.

NAACP members were
disgusted and irate over Vinik’s regressive tax

Vinik’s three stooges—Rena Frazier, Brian Willis, and Michael
Stephens—were envisioned by their boss as glib emissaries.At the end of the evening, the trio were
tongue-tied and nonplused by incisive questioning and criticism over Vinik’s
hidden agenda—the bailout of his troubled Water Street Tampa development.

Tampa
Bay Beat has learned from two independent sources that certain people close to
the NAACP were offered cash to wheedle an endorsement of what amounts to a
multi-billion dollar taxpayer swindle. No amount of cajoling, pandering,
and outright lying had any effect either.

Transit
monies would bail out a beleaguered Vinik and his Underwater Street development

No local media were in apparent attendance.The Tampa Bay Times, the primary propaganda arm
for Vinik, was criticized for its unbalanced coverage of the issue which will,
if passed, displace minorities residing in East Tampa.

Vinik
is the de facto owner of the Times. He and a few others essentially own
the financially failing media entity. Other media outlets in Tampa Bay
have been compromised in their coverage of the transit scam and Tampa Bay Beat
will have more on this in the coming week.

Hudson,
Vinik’s frontman, would rather have been anywhere else.

Tyler Hudson, Vinik’s point man in the grossly misnamed All For
Transportation (AFT) effort, sat grim faced in the audience as criticism from
Tampa’s black community rained down on the plan.Cristina
Barker, Mayor Bob Buckhorn’s former protegé on loan to Vinik, sat frowning and
scribbling notes. Kevin Thurman, the fourth stooge and relegated to the
audience, ineptly tried to explain the glaring flaws in the $15 billion,
30-year developer bailout which would make Hillsborough County the Florida
county with the highest sales tax.

Stephens propagandized the regressive tax as the “alternative to
nothing” but irate audience members debunked that explanation as clearly false.

Rejection of the transit tax by a key demographic could seal the
fate of the misguided referendum.The
Vinik-led scheme already had stiff opposition from residents in unincorporated
Hillsborough, conservatives, savvy progressives, and those who didn’t
just enter this life and are able to recognize blatant fraud.

City
voters outside the downtown core won’t benefit from an expensive USF-airport
light rail system that would be obsolete well before its completion.

“If
Jeff Vinik and Frank Morsani were interested in the minority community,” they
would have been paying the $30 annual NAACP dues,” observed one member of the
audience.

Morsani,
along with Vinik, are the main bankrollers of the tax. The Morsani
College of Medicine at The University of South Florida is the anchor tenant at
the Water Street flop.

Others criticizedthe All for
Transportation so-called “ oversight committee” which has no allowance for
average citizens who will be affected by the billion dollar scam.The committee would consist of representatives
of the special interests who will reap the financial windfall from the tax.

Attendees
at the monthly meeting wisely noted that developers have not been paying impact
fees commensurate with the benefits they reap from Hillsborough County.

Earlier
in the day, Hillsborough County Commissioner Stacy White held a press
conference where he asserted the $15 billion Vinik honeypot would be overseen
by a committee not accountable to the citizens of Hillsborough County.

White
also noted that added road capacity, defined as widening roads or building
new roads, is expressly prohibited under the Vinik scheme. Because of the
prohibition, the plan would do very little for suburban commuters, he said.

The
commissioner’s concerns dovetailed with those expressed at the NAACP meeting.

“This proposal seeks to embed this tax into the Hillsborough
County Charter (which is like our local constitution) and it does not call for
just the tax increase,” White explained.

“It would give an independent committee – whose members would not
be responsible or accountable to you, the citizen – the authority to spend the
funds. Furthermore, the ballot language paves the way for this committee to be
stacked with members that are not from the areas where the majority of these
taxes will be paid.”

The
name “All for Transportation” is a red herring. In a county where
1.4 million reside, it was actually a microscopic “community” of five donors
who paid consultants and petition gatherers to get the transit tax hike on the
ballot. A dismal $700.72 came from 10 other donors, a whopping 15 donors in
all.

The
referendum, with misleading and suspect ballot language, was approved for the
November ballot by Hillsborough County Supervisor of Elections Craig Latimer.
An auditing process that typically takes a minimum of six months was
fast-tracked in 40 days. The auditing firm in charge has a history of
fraudulent activity and was forced to change its name due to its disreputable
skullduggery in Alabama

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